The quality and types of drinks and the diet of Marylanders have changed over the centuries. The changes were not always beneficial. But food and drink were always abundant.

The Colonial Era
At the start of the colony, the English and Irish could not maintain their customary diet of wheat bread, beef or mutton, beer, and cider. Instead the early colonists had to rely on small game and wildfowl and American Indian staples. They ate Indian corn called maize, the local beans, and a variety of squashes. They developed a special taste for pumpkins. Archeologists digging in early settlements in southern Maryland garbage pits have found the remnants of sheepsheads, catfish, white perch, and sturgeon. Oysters were abundant.

In time, meat from domestic animals appeared in the kitchen. Beef and salted or smoked pork were most common. Colonists also ate lamb products, but mutton never became as important as it was in the old world. Chickens were valued more for their eggs than for their meat.

Garden Produce
Before the twentieth century, people had no concept of vitamins. Food was judged on the basis of whether it was filling and gave energy. Vegetables were considered relishes, like catsup (made from vinegar, mushrooms, cucumbers, and nuts) or pickles.

Settlers planted peas, cabbage, carrots, and onions. White potatoes were rare in Maryland as in most of the south; people usually ate the more nutritious sweet potatoes. Most "sallads" of the time consisted of boiled greens seasoned with salt meat, a food habit adopted from the slaves.

Women preserved a variety of fruits with sugar to make jams and candied fruit. Some garden products like watermelon rind and cucumbers were pickled with vinegar and salt. Many liked the shredded and salted cabbage called "sour-crout," an Anglicized spelling of German sauerkraut.

Drinking
Fresh drinking water was available only in the earliest years. As the colony expanded north and west in the eighteenth century, it became necessary to boil the water or add beer, cider, or rum to purify it.

Alcohol consumption was high. The colonists liked hard cider and soon planted apple trees. The housewife brewed beer from persimmons, sweet potatoes, or pumpkins. Rum imported from the West Indies was cheap and plentiful. Even children were given a small amount of diluted alcohol to protect them from the dangers of disease in the water supply. Only the very poorest people drank plain water.

Visitors to the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, drank a good quantity of beer, wine, and sometimes rum diluted with water and called grog. If the rum was diluted with fruit juice, it was called punch. A favorite beverage of the club, according to the secretary, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, was called "lambswool," a mixture of white wine, sugar, and roasted apples.

Andrew Burnaby, traveling through Maryland in the mid-eighteenth century, noted incredible quantities of fruits that were preserved by fermenting. He tried a local Burgundy wine that Benjamin Tasker had produced from grapes grown on his Prince George's County plantation.

Tea grew in popularity. Inventories taken at death began to list tea implements such as cups, saucers, and teapots more and more often as the eighteenth century wore on. By the 1770s almost every household wealthy enough to list some assets had a means of brewing and drinking tea. The revolution brought this ubiquitous custom to a temporary halt.

Cooking Methods
Before the Revolution, food was cooked by baking, boiling, or roasting on a spit. The housewife seldom fried foods. Meat was stewed with whatever herbs were available in the garden. Those who could afford to purchase imported spices added raisins, mace, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, or black pepper as seasoning.

Maize was the staple of the table for all classes of people. In the Indian fashion, the corn was first soaked in ashes (lye). The colonial housewife crushed the kernels into a coarse flour and boiled it to make a mush resembling porridge called hominy or grits. Like the Indians, she sometimes added peas, beans, and squash to the hominy. As a substitute for wheat flour, the corn could be pounded and sifted, mixed with water and lard, and then baked to make bread. When milk and eggs were added to the corn flour, it was called pone. In time, wheat flour was combined with the corn to make a less crumbly bread.

Salt was important as a preservative for both beef and pork, but the salted beef was never as tasty or tender as the pork. The cattle were puny and provided only tough beef that required long hours of cooking. Colonists consumed much larger quantities of salted or smoked pork than any other meat. Because of the inadequacies of the cattle, Marylanders had little fresh milk. What was available was consumed immediately or churned into butter. They seldom had enough milk left over to make cheese.

Typical Means
Breakfast usually consisted of cold meat and bread. Dinner, served between two and three in the afternoon included several meats, side dishes of relishes and whatever was available from the garden. The second course consisted of various sweets made from fruits and possibly ice cream. Supper, like breakfast, was a light meal.

However, an evening meal served at the Annapolis Tuesday Club in January of 1751 was more elaborate. A first course was limited to "two dishes of meat.either roast or broiled." They added "butter, cheese, and all Garden stuff in the Season," as side dishes. For the second course they had "two dishes of desert." Among the meats mentioned in the club records were veal, mutton, turkey, and a prized delicacy, beef tongue.

William Eddis, a sojourner in Maryland in the 1770s, noted the abundance and variety of fish, poultry, and wild fowl eaten by the most "humble cottagers." Even in the back country near Hagerstown, Eddis was amazed at the variety of foodstuffs. Maple trees were tapped for syrup to sweeten foods.

After the war, evidence of greater variety can be seen in the food served by William Faris, watchmaker and tavern-keeper in Annapolis. In his own garden he grew cucumbers, squash, radishes, cantaloupes, asparagus, and watermelons. He ordered cauliflower from the Baltimore markets in season and bought leafy vegetables.

The wealthy Charles Carroll of Carrollton fashionably purchased olive oil to dress the greens served in his house. He imported English Cheshire cheese and double Gloucester, and drank Turkish coffee. He liked French olives, anchovies, and mustard to flavor his meats.

An Unbalanced Diet
This early Maryland diet was not well balanced-it was too dependent on salted meat products and alcoholic beverages-and was deficient in vegetables. Excessive amounts of sugar and salt to preserve foods probably contributed to rapid tooth decay and circulatory problems. But the foods were abundant and supplied adequate protein and calories. Beer and cider provided some essential vitamins. It was a more nutritious diet than was available in England.

New Drinks
The revolutionary era from 1774 to the early 1780s severely limited imports of the more exotic foods and drink. Instead of Chinese tea, people brewed coffee or drank cocoa in the French manner (no sugar or milk). Instead of Barbadian rum, Marylanders switched to whiskey distilled from local corn or their own fruit brandy,

A new wave of Scots-Irish grain distillers settled in the Appalachian frontier and adapted their skills to distilling corn. So cheap was this new whiskey that it undercut the price of rum, which never fully recovered the Maryland market after the Revolution.

Diet on the Decline
In spite of an increasing abundance of food, the quality of the diet declined in the first half of the nineteenth century. Expanding cities like Baltimore eliminated urban garden plots, the family milk cow, and chickens to provide eggs. Fresh vegetables became more scarce and milk, like water, carried the danger of sickness. Butter often became rancid. People feared eating fresh fruit after the cholera epidemic of the 1830s.

Visitors everywhere complained that Americans ate too much, too fast. Thanks to the invention of the cooking range, Marylanders began to deep fry foods in pork fat (lard). Fried chicken became a specialty. Greasy, undercooked pork and corn products were the expected fare in taverns and the new eating places called restaurants. Consumption of alcohol grew, whiskey replacing even the cider and beer of the earlier time.

Unique additions to the diet include the beaten biscuit that required hitting the dough with a club or mallet for anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes. Terrapins (small turtles) also acquired respectability.

Technology to the Rescue
By the mid-nineteenth century, technological advances in farming, refrigeration, and transportation began to improve the diet. Railroads, canals, and steam-operated ferry service across the Chesapeake Bay, brought the produce of the entire state into a mass market. Near railroad junctions one had access to fresh eggs, meat, and milk. The garden produce and seafood of the Eastern Shore could be shipped to Baltimore.

John Beale Bordley, an agricultural innovator, devised a more effective system of cooling his milk by running water through pipes in the walls of the milk house on his Wye Island farm. Thomas Moore, another Maryland farmer, invented the ice-cooled refrigerator in 1803. Both devices made it possible to keep milk and fresh meat from spoiling so quickly. Refrigerated cars even brought fish and oysters in season to Baltimore.

Long before the Civil War, canneries on the Eastern Shore transformed and made available all year peas, tomatoes, and other vegetables as well as seafood. Tomatoes, which had been rejected as poisonous fruit previously, finally entered into the Maryland diet. Even some crab meat was shipped to the urban markets, although it was not yet as popular as oysters. In 1812 an observer noted the lack of market for Chesapeake Bay crabs. When found, watermen crushed the crabs to keep them from clogging nets.

New Immigrants
Thousands of immigrants from Ireland and Germany brought new ideas about food and drink. Although the white potato was consumed occasionally, it was never as popular in Maryland as the sweet potato until the massive Irish immigration of the 1840s and 1850s.

A new wave of German immigrants in the Baltimore area between 1819 and 1860 brought beer drinking customs with them. They established breweries with saloons and beer gardens attached. The Highlandtown and Canton areas of Baltimore were dotted with innumerable breweries providing a high quality lager beer. The camaraderie and sociability of the beer garden drew Baltimoreans away from hard liquor to the less alcoholic beverages considered healthful and nutritious.

Modern Times
Although whiskey has declined in consumption, beer and wine have increased in popularity. Few people drink hard cider. Tap water, now chlorinated and purified, is brought in from reservoirs through pipes. Available varieties of tea and coffee would astonish our colonial forebears. Nationally distributed soft drinks provide more variety.

Diet has changed more dramatically than drinks. Meals have been simplified with more vegetables and fewer servings of meat and fish at the same meal. Electricity and with it improved refrigeration and the ability to freeze foods have eliminated much of the high salt and sugar content necessary to preserve meats, vegetables, and fruits. Ham, bacon, and sausage, however, have not lost their attraction. The growth of the poultry industry on the Eastern Shore has reinforced the taste for chicken, deep fried, pan fried, or stewed.

As in the rest of the country, immigrants from Eastern and southern Europe, South and Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have brought their traditional foods. Pizza, bagels, sushi, salsa, hot peppers, curries, and kielbasa are almost as much a part of the Maryland diet as are ham and corn bread.

The blue crab finally entered into the mythology of Maryland food. Whether steamed with kosher salt and Old Bay seasoning, served as imperial, cakes, or fritters, or eaten as soft crabs, Maryland life has become synonymous with that once scorned crustacean.

Fresh fish, especially rockfish, shad (and its delicate roe), catfish, snapper, and bluefish are still found in the markets. Wildfowl like duck and goose vie with turkey even at the Thanksgiving table. One side dish for that fall celebration continues to be sauerkraut.

While this Maryland diet reflects the newest national trends in eating, it retains enough of the old to give it a distinctive local flavor.

Carr, Lois Green et al. Robert Cole's World: Agriculture & Society in Early Maryland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Miller, Henry. "An Archeological Perspective on the Evolution of Diet in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1620-1745" in Colonial Chesapeake Society. Lois Green Carr, et al.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Rorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Sarudy, Barbara Wells. Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700-1805. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Stieff, Frederick Philip. Eat, Drink & Be Merry In Maryland. 1932; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Tawes, Helen Avalynne. My Favorite Maryland Recipes. 1964; repr. Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 2001.